The Incredibly Weird Canadian Story That Shows How the Rachel Dolezal Frenzy Might Play Out

Almost 80 years ago, another case of "transracialism" hit Canada.

The facts of the Rachel Dolezal case are by now established, but her story, in all its vast complications, keeps on spiraling. After she left her post as president of the Spokane, Washington, chapter of the NAACP, her defense of her deception, if it can even be called such, was that she "identified as black." Her claim of what's been called "transracialism" has led to a host of some of the most profound questions posed by our moment: How fluid is the nature of racial identity? What is the difference between what you feel you are and what you actually are? Does mere biological facticity disrupt the achievement of her activism? In a decidedly disturbed moment in the history of American race relations, Dolezal represents so much more than her own confusion.

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To Canadians, who are not supposed to have the same tortured history of race as Americans, the Dolezal story is surprisingly familiar. Several commentators here have noted the connection to the story of Grey Owl, the greatest literary hoax in the country's history. In the1920s and 1930s, Grey Owl was the most successful native rights and environmentalist activist in the country. A Metis trapper who lived with the Ojibwe as a trapper, Grey Owl was the subject of several films that became massively popular. He wrote books and gave lectures and, more than any other figure, was responsible for giving white Canadians their sense of connection with the great Northern wildernesses.

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After his death, it turned out that Grey Owl wasn't Ojibwe. He wasn't Metis. He was born Archibald Belaney in Hastings, England. His youthful daydreams about the tribes of Canada, and a study of the country's natural history, led to a permanent obsession. When he was 18, he moved to Canada, joined the Ojibwe, who adopted him in 1907 and gave him the name "He-Who-Travels-by-Night" or "Grey Owl." He was, incidentally, a bigamist and an alcoholic as well as a fraud, and his identification with Canadian native peoples may have been the most stable aspect of his personality.

Grey Owl, whose real name was Archibald Belaney.

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In 1918, he met his wife Anahareo, an urbanized Iroquois living in Montreal under the name Gertrude Bernard. He convinced her to move back to the bush with him. One academic describes the bizarre identity politics of their romance this way: "And so an urban Indian is taught by a white man posing as a Native how to survive in the woods as an Indian. When Archibald Belaney's 'true' Scottish ethnic identity is revealed later on, Anahareo says that she never suspected him to be a fake and that to her he will always remain an Indian."

Perhaps because he was living a lie, or perhaps just because he was an alcoholic, Grey Owl drank himself to death in 1938. Shortly afterward, he was exposed as "Canada's most famous fake" and his literary and personal reputation completely collapsed.

But here is where things get interesting. A different take on Archibald Belaney eventually emerged. Margaret Atwood in 1995 wrote an essay on Grey Owl which was a rousing defense of his fraud:

"Perhaps the thing to do with it is not to repudiate it or ridicule it as naive, sentimental, and embarrassing—a matter of grown men playing feather dress-ups—but to take it a step further: if white Canadians would adopt a more traditionally Native attitude towards the natural world, a less exploitative and more respectful attitude, they might be able to reverse the galloping environmental carnage of the late twentieth century and salvage for themselves some that wilderness they keep saying they identify with and need."

Atwood goes on to point out that, without Belaney, without his activism and his fraud, it is almost certain that the beaver would currently be extinct in central Canada and the United States. He saved that species.

What does this mean for the story of Rachel Dolezal? The initial reaction to headlines about her was shock that anyone white in America would want to pass for black, and of course a few idiot conservatives have used this example to argue just how good things are for black people and how bad they are for white people. When Belaney decided to pass for native, he was doing so in a time when the country was engaged in what a recent report described as "cultural genocide."

What Grey Owl and Rachel Dolezal's stories reveal is that the insanity of racial prejudice, in all its viciousness and stupidity, fucks us all up—black, white, native, and everybody else. In particular cases of craziness—or "fluidity" in you prefer—the only sensible response is compassion. When the shock of the fraud wears off and when the labyrinth of identity politics has been pursued to its end, fundamentally the question is one of action. Who he thought he was, who others thought he was, the games of identity he played, games which are little more than shadows and wind even in the clearest of cases, they fell away from Grey Owl. The question that remains is a very simple one: What did he do?

Action determines character, as Aristotle knew. Eventually, everyone will understand that actions are what matter about Rachel Dolezal just as they do for Grey Owl. It may take years, even decades, for the fury of her drama to calm and the nature of those actions to reveal themselves. But they will. In the end, Grey Owl saved the beaver. That's who he was.